Businesses have often grappled with questions regarding what to automate in their business processes and how to go about it. Automation costs money and it does not make sense to invest in building technology unless it can make the process significantly cost-effective. It is for this reason that sales has been among the last bastions of business where automation has still not taken over manual processes. Businesses simply do not want to risk conversions by replacing tried-and-tested sales managers with automated alternatives.

However, a slew of new technology tools have cropped up in recent times that are helping with automating sales processes. We are not talking about CRM tools like Salesforce that make your process efficient. Instead, we are talking about tools that replace human interactions and manual processes with technology alternatives. A number of acceleration tools today help with automating sales processes like authenticating customer data, initiating sales touch, accelerating outbound reach, tracking inbound calls and mapping them with referral source, comprehensive analytics and A/B testing sales follow up processes.

Modern sales intelligence tools go a step further and use smart voice recognition technology to track keywords used by the sales executive and the client over a phone call and map it against various benchmarks like conversion rate and win-loss analysis. According to Primary Intelligence, the company behind the TruVoice win-loss analysis software, businesses today use such futuristic technologies regularly to analyze the performance of the various members of the sales team as well as to benchmark the core competencies of their business against competition. They have helped businesses analyze metrics that hitherto did not exist.

So from an IT manager's perspective, what are the technologies that go behind building a sales intelligence product. Here is a short list

Voice Recognition: One of the futuristic technologies in sales intelligence is interpreting the topic of conversation using keywords. There are a number of open source technologies you could deploy for this like OpenEars and Simon – your client will need to prepare a list of trigger keywords that shall be tracked and monitored through this software and the output shall be used to prepare checklist of discussed topics and benchmark them for conversion and success rates.

Lead Extraction: Another critical component of sales acceleration is automating the sales pipeline. A lot of this low-cost lead generating services are built from scraping public directories like LinkedIn, WhitePages and 411. Do note that scraping is against the terms of service of most of these companies and are liable for lawsuits. The alternative is to make use of publicly approved APIs. However, as far as I can see, API access is extremely limiting and it may not really be cost-effective to automate pipelines using this method; unless you are building a third party sales intelligence tool yourself.

Inbound Call Tracking: Inbound phone call tracking is done to track down the source of a specific lead to a particular campaign (like billboard, Adwords or flyers). This is relatively straight-forward and involves tying up with a third party phone number provider like Twilio or Plivo. Using their API, it is possible to generate a bunch of phone numbers that all redirect to your inbound sales team. These phone numbers are uniquely tied to specific campaigns like billboards or Adwords so that a prospect calling over a specific phone number can be identified with their referral source. You can also take this a step further and use this technology to track specific pages on your website that triggered an inbound sales call. This is done by generating a large pool of phone numbers to uniquely cater to all your concurrent website visitors. This way, a particular phone number is only displayed to one visitor at any point in time. By storing information about the pages visited by a visitor and the unique phone number displayed to them, it is possible to get a host of information about a particular caller including the website page that triggered the call, the location of the caller and their online referral source.

Having said that, unless you are building a third party tool, it does not make economic sense to build a sales intelligence product from scratch. As a business, it is always recommended that you focus on your core-competencies and make use of sales intelligence tools already available in the market.